Posts Tagged ‘ supreme court ’

On Monday, January 7th the Supreme Court rejected a First Amendment dispute over the Florida Department of Corrections statewide ban of Prison Legal News (PLN), a magazine distributed monthly by Human Rights Defense Center. The ban has been in place since 2009, and the potential Supreme Court appeal of it had generated support in the…

The First Amendment, ratified in 1791, is by no means new. But as the recent book The Free Speech Century points out, it was largely uninterpreted until three landmark decisions came down from the Supreme Court in 1919 – marking 2019 the 100th anniversary of the relevance of the First Amendment. And when considering all…

Today, the Supreme Court unanimously struck down portions of the Lanham Act, and supported an Asian-American band’s right to an “offensive” trademark. When the activist Asian-American rock band decided on a name that both affirms their racial identity and reclaims a racist term as a way to challenge stereotypes — The Slants — they likely didn’t expect to end…

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case Lee v. Tam this week, with most justices who spoke evincing at least some skepticism of the federal government’s argument that it may deny trademarks deemed to be “disparaging.” CBLDF last month joined a Cato Institute-led amicus brief in support of the plaintiffs, an Asian American…

Five years ago this month, the Supreme Court decided in Brown v. EMA that a California law banning the sale of violent video games to minors was unconstitutional. Like every relatively new medium before them — comics in the 1950s, film in the 1930s — video games are still in the midst of an emergence…

In late March, free speech scored a victory overseas when the Indian Supreme Court officials annulled Section 66A of the Information Technology (IT) Act, 2008, ensuring greater freedom of expression for Indian citizens in online communications. Section 66A not only grossly violated citizens’ ability to access and distribute information on the internet, but its subjective…

As you may have heard, this week the Supreme Court unanimously decided that police must obtain a warrant to search the cellphone of someone they arrest. What does this mean for comics fans and professionals? We’re glad you asked! First, a little background on the ruling. In two cases – Riley v. California and United States…

In a few days we will mark the 11th anniversary since the Supreme Court decided in United States v. American Library Association that filtering of Internet access on school and library computers does not infringe on free speech rights. The case resulted from ALA’s challenge to the Children’s Internet Protection Act of 2000, which requires…

Until recently, most of us here at CBLDF could only claim to know State Senator Leland Yee of California as the man behind the law struck down by the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. EMA. As of this week, however, the world knows Yee as one of the people arrested in a series of…

Free expression rights for public school students were resoundingly reaffirmed today, as the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear a Pennsylvania school district’s argument that it could prohibit students from wearing breast cancer awareness bracelets that read “I ♥ boobies!” The court denied the appeal of B.H. v. Easton Area School District with no comment,…